Stuttering-Aware Automatic Speech Recognition for Indonesian Language

Automatic speech recognition systems have achieved remarkable performance on fluent speech but continue to degrade significantly when processing stuttered speech, a limitation that is particularly acute for low-resource languages like Indonesian where specialized datasets are virtually non-existent. To overcome this scarcity, we propose a data augmentation framework that generates synthetic stuttered audio by injecting repetitions and prolongations into fluent text through a combination of rule-based transformations and large language models followed by text-to-speech synthesis. We apply this synthetic data to fine-tune a pre-trained Indonesian Whisper model using transfer learning, enabling the architecture to adapt to dysfluent acoustic patterns without requiring large-scale real-world recordings. Our experiments demonstrate that this targeted synthetic exposure consistently reduces recognition errors on stuttered speech while maintaining performance on fluent segments, validating the utility of synthetic data pipelines for developing more inclusive speech technologies in under-represented languages.

WESR: Scaling and Evaluating Word-level Event-Speech Recognition

Speech conveys not only linguistic information but also rich non-verbal vocal events such as laughing and crying. While semantic transcription is well-studied, the precise localization of non-verbal events remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. Current methods suffer from insufficient task definitions with limited category coverage and ambiguous temporal granularity. They also lack standardized evaluation frameworks, hindering the development of downstream applications. To bridge this gap, we first develop a refined taxonomy of 21 vocal events, with a new categorization into discrete (standalone) versus continuous (mixed with speech) types. Based on the refined taxonomy, we introduce WESR-Bench, an expert-annotated evaluation set (900+ utterances) with a novel position-aware protocol that disentangles ASR errors from event detection, enabling precise localization measurement for both discrete and continuous events. We also build a strong baseline by constructing a 1,700+ hour corpus, and train specialized models, surpassing both open-source audio-language models and commercial APIs while preserving ASR quality. We anticipate that WESR will serve as a foundational resource for future research in modeling rich, real-world auditory scenes.

Robust CAPTCHA Using Audio Illusions in the Era of Large Language Models: from Evaluation to Advances

CAPTCHAs are widely used by websites to block bots and spam by presenting challenges that are easy for humans but difficult for automated programs to solve. To improve accessibility, audio CAPTCHAs are designed to complement visual ones. However, the robustness of audio CAPTCHAs against advanced Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce AI-CAPTCHA, a unified framework that offers (i) an evaluation framework, ACEval, which includes advanced LALM- and ASR-based solvers, and (ii) a novel audio CAPTCHA approach, IllusionAudio, leveraging audio illusions. Through extensive evaluations of seven widely deployed audio CAPTCHAs, we show that most existing methods can be solved with high success rates by advanced LALMs and ASR models, exposing critical security weaknesses. To address these vulnerabilities, we design a new audio CAPTCHA approach, IllusionAudio, which exploits perceptual illusion cues rooted in human auditory mechanisms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method defeats all tested LALM- and ASR-based attacks while achieving a 100% human pass rate, significantly outperforming existing audio CAPTCHA methods.

SLAM-LLM: A Modular, Open-Source Multimodal Large Language Model Framework and Best Practice for Speech, Language, Audio and Music Processing

The recent surge in open-source Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLM) frameworks, such as LLaVA, provides a convenient kickoff for artificial intelligence developers and researchers. However, most of the MLLM frameworks take vision as the main input modality, and provide limited in-depth support for the modality of speech, audio, and music. This situation hinders the development of audio-language models, and forces researchers to spend a lot of effort on code writing and hyperparameter tuning. We present SLAM-LLM, an open-source deep learning framework designed to train customized MLLMs, focused on speech, language, audio, and music processing. SLAM-LLM provides a modular configuration of different encoders, projectors, LLMs, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning plugins. SLAM-LLM also includes detailed training and inference recipes for mainstream tasks, along with high-performance checkpoints like LLM-based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Automated Audio Captioning (AAC), and Music Captioning (MC). Some of these recipes have already reached or are nearing state-of-the-art performance, and some relevant techniques have also been accepted by academic papers. We hope SLAM-LLM will accelerate iteration, development, data engineering, and model training for researchers. We are committed to continually pushing forward audio-based MLLMs through this open-source framework, and call on the community to contribute to the LLM-based speech, audio and music processing.

LLMs-Integrated Automatic Hate Speech Recognition Using Controllable Text Generation Models

This paper proposes an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for hate speech using large language models (LLMs). The proposed method integrates the encoder of the ASR model with the decoder of the LLMs, enabling simultaneous transcription and censorship tasks to prevent the exposure of harmful content. Instruction tuning of the LLM to mask hate-related words with specific tokens requires an annotated hate speech dataset, which is limited. We generate text samples using an LLM with the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting technique guided by cultural context and examples and then convert them into speech samples using a text-to-speech (TTS) system. However, some of them contain non-hate speech samples with hate-related words, which degrades the censorship performance. This paper filters the samples which text classification models correctly label as hate content. By adjusting the threshold for the number of correct answer models, we can control the level of hate in the generated dataset, allowing us to train the LLMs through curriculum learning in a gradual manner. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a masking accuracy of 58.6\% for hate-related words, surpassing previous baselines. We also confirm that the curriculum training contributes to the efficiency of both transcription and censorship tasks.

ParaMETA: Towards Learning Disentangled Paralinguistic Speaking Styles Representations from Speech

Learning representative embeddings for different types of speaking styles, such as emotion, age, and gender, is critical for both recognition tasks (e.g., cognitive computing and human-computer interaction) and generative tasks (e.g., style-controllable speech generation). In this work, we introduce ParaMETA, a unified and flexible framework for learning and controlling speaking styles directly from speech. Unlike existing methods that rely on single-task models or cross-modal alignment, ParaMETA learns disentangled, task-specific embeddings by projecting speech into dedicated subspaces for each type of style. This design reduces inter-task interference, mitigates negative transfer, and allows a single model to handle multiple paralinguistic tasks such as emotion, gender, age, and language classification. Beyond recognition, ParaMETA enables fine-grained style control in Text-To-Speech (TTS) generative models. It supports both speech- and text-based prompting and allows users to modify one speaking styles while preserving others. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ParaMETA outperforms strong baselines in classification accuracy and generates more natural and expressive speech, while maintaining a lightweight and efficient model suitable for real-world applications.

Multi-channel multi-speaker transformer for speech recognition

With the development of teleconferencing and in-vehicle voice assistants, far-field multi-speaker speech recognition has become a hot research topic. Recently, a multi-channel transformer (MCT) has been proposed, which demonstrates the ability of the transformer to model far-field acoustic environments. However, MCT cannot encode high-dimensional acoustic features for each speaker from mixed input audio because of the interference between speakers. Based on these, we propose the multi-channel multi-speaker transformer (M2Former) for far-field multi-speaker ASR in this paper. Experiments on the SMS-WSJ benchmark show that the M2Former outperforms the neural beamformer, MCT, dual-path RNN with transform-average-concatenate and multi-channel deep clustering based end-to-end systems by 9.2%, 14.3%, 24.9%, and 52.2% respectively, in terms of relative word error rate reduction.

RIR-Mega-Speech: A Reverberant Speech Corpus with Comprehensive Acoustic Metadata and Reproducible Evaluation

Despite decades of research on reverberant speech, comparing methods remains difficult because most corpora lack per-file acoustic annotations or provide limited documentation for reproduction. We present RIR-Mega-Speech, a corpus of approximately 117.5 hours created by convolving LibriSpeech utterances with roughly 5,000 simulated room impulse responses from the RIR-Mega collection. Every file includes RT60, direct-to-reverberant ratio (DRR), and clarity index ($C_{50}$) computed from the source RIR using clearly defined, reproducible procedures. We also provide scripts to rebuild the dataset and reproduce all evaluation results. Using Whisper small on 1,500 paired utterances, we measure 5.20% WER (95% CI: 4.69--5.78) on clean speech and 7.70% (7.04--8.35) on reverberant versions, corresponding to a paired increase of 2.50 percentage points (2.06--2.98). This represents a 48% relative degradation. WER increases monotonically with RT60 and decreases with DRR, consistent with prior perceptual studies. While the core finding that reverberation harms recognition is well established, we aim to provide the community with a standardized resource where acoustic conditions are transparent and results can be verified independently. The repository includes one-command rebuild instructions for both Windows and Linux environments.

Task Arithmetic with Support Languages for Low-Resource ASR

The development of resource-constrained approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR) is of great interest due to its broad applicability to many low-resource languages for which there is scant usable data. Existing approaches to many low-resource natural language processing tasks leverage additional data from higher-resource languages that are closely related to a target low-resource language. One increasingly popular approach uses task arithmetic to combine models trained on different tasks to create a model for a task where there is little to no training data. In this paper, we consider training on a particular language to be a task, and we generate task vectors by fine-tuning variants of the Whisper ASR system. For pairings of high- and low-resource languages, we merge task vectors via a linear combination, optimizing the weights of the linear combination on the downstream word error rate on the low-resource target language's validation set. We find that this approach consistently improves performance on the target languages.

TidyVoice: A Curated Multilingual Dataset for Speaker Verification Derived from Common Voice

The development of robust, multilingual speaker recognition systems is hindered by a lack of large-scale, publicly available and multilingual datasets, particularly for the read-speech style crucial for applications like anti-spoofing. To address this gap, we introduce the TidyVoice dataset derived from the Mozilla Common Voice corpus after mitigating its inherent speaker heterogeneity within the provided client IDs. TidyVoice currently contains training and test data from over 212,000 monolingual speakers (Tidy-M) and around 4,500 multilingual speakers (Tidy-X) from which we derive two distinct conditions. The Tidy-M condition contains target and non-target trials from monolingual speakers across 81 languages. The Tidy-X condition contains target and non-target trials from multilingual speakers in both same- and cross-language trials. We employ two architectures of ResNet models, achieving a 0.35% EER by fine-tuning on our comprehensive Tidy-M partition. Moreover, we show that this fine-tuning enhances the model's generalization, improving performance on unseen conversational interview data from the CANDOR corpus. The complete dataset, evaluation trials, and our models are publicly released to provide a new resource for the community.